Behavioral data gathering for assessing functional status and health in older adults using mobile phones

Abstract Modern mobile phones include a variety of sensors that can be used to develop context-aware applications and gather data about the user’s behavior, including the places she visits, her level of activity, and how frequently and with whom she socializes. In this work, we present InCense, a toolkit for facilitating the collection of behavioral data gathering from populations of mobile phone users. This paper describes InCense, its components, and presents the results of a sensing campaign in which InCense was used for collecting behavior data from older adults. The paper concludes by presenting how the data collected can be used for supporting functional assessment in older adults, which often relies on self-reports by patients, that is, assessment is based on the accounts provided by patients, which can have some validity problems as patients often underreport or exaggerate their habits or symptoms, possibly leading to an unreliable diagnosis.